1. Field of the Invention
The field of this invention is the mining industry, particularly the bulk transfer, processing, blending, and storage of natural resources.
2. Brief Description of the Prior Art
The field of application concerns many mining resources, but without loss of generality and to promote the understanding of the invention through a specific example, the coal mining industry shall be considered.
From the implementation of the development of a broad means of optimizing the allocation of coal and other natural resources as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,033,004 by the present inventor, a number of important needs and difficulties have been identified.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,033,004 provided for a method of optimizing the allocation of multiple coal types with multiple qualities, processing through multiple possible processing paths, delivery of such blended combinations of processed and nonprocessed coal batches to a multiplicity of orders each with unique quality specifications and premiums or penalties that such delivered batches must meet. And since such allocation choices should reflect these allocation needs designated for a multiplicity of time periods such as days, weeks, months, or years, U.S. Pat. No. 5,033,004 provided a method of also achieving such allocation needs over multiple time periods.
Over the first few years of introducing this new technology, a number of problems have been identified. A number of these concerns the broad category of input and the deficiencies of the allocation infrastructure in the manual handling of data, tracking of resource allocation, processing, and associated qualities as well as the organization of the elements of allocation through a more comprehensive database structure.
The typical allocation begins in a pit of a strip mine or at the mouth of a deep mine. There, a loader shovels coal into a truck which begins the source coal's transfer. Typically, a radio voice message is given by a loader operator to a truck operator who is suppose to remember what coal type he is carrying and from where it came. Many times this basic information is not remembered in the transfer process. Moreover, other pertinent information, that could be bound with the coal being transferred is not associated with the transferred coal because of time and accuracy restrictions on the part of the coal loader and truck operators. For example, specific information associated with the loaded source coal may have inaccuracies introduced or may be lost such as the source mine, the source pit, the source sector of the pit, the source property owner of the pit, the date and time the source coal was moved, the estimates of the quality and beneficiation response of the source coal and other particular information of loaded source coal--such as there is excess rock debris that was loaded in this truck.
Next, the truck and coal combination is typically weighed on scales. This is typically the first stage where information is picked up and stored in a computer. Autoscale, located in Charleston, W. Va. has made advances in collecting scale data onto a Personal Computer directly from the scale weights. Further, the truck operator, usually has a magnetically readable card with his truck information encoded on the card. By swiping the card in a card reader at the scale site, the trucking company and truck number can be directly read into a personal computer in the scale house. The date and time of the weighing are read from the personal computer, and the scale weight is read from the scale into the personal computer. Usually there is a keyboard with the card reader at the scale where the truck driver can input a predetermined code designating the source of his load. At the end of a shift or day, a number of trucks and their associated tons are totaled by source. Hence, the number of tons of each delivered source coal are determined from the input information provided the information is accurately input.
Typically, coal samples are taken from some of the source coal delivery trucks associated with each source coal. Such samples are used to provide an estimate of the quality associated with all of the trucked coal over a designated period of time--such as a day.
The coal samples are evaluated by a coal lab which relays the results by radio, fax, or input to a computer spreadsheet or database of laboratory results.
After weighing the coal and from time to time sampling the coal, the coal is routed, usually by a loader driver, to unload the coal either in a stock pile or directly into a bin which may be feeding a coal wash plant, or shipment such as into a barge, rail, or vessel. Typically, the exact location of the unloaded truck is not recorded, except a gross note by the loader operator that a number of trucks deposited tons in a stock pile and others were directed to a bin. But, typically, this exact information is not recorded since the loader operator does not have time.
If, the source of the coal is a stock pile rather than a pit, the exact tons or shovel count of removed coal from where exactly in the stock pile is typically only approximated by the loader operator. Furthermore, since each transaction is time consuming to record in detail, the estimation of exact source, its quantity, and its associated quality estimate become more and more inaccurate.
Also, in the past, the most important pieces of information have been the total tons and quality delivered to a customer. At this stage more accurate sampling and weighing is performed (in many cases by automatic samplers) and coordinated by coal supplier, customer, and in many cases third party referees. The emphasis on this final stage of the allocation process has meant that the earlier stages could be relatively ignored or at least not as aggressively tracked. This was especially true since the cost to manually track this detailed allocation information was great or required additional time and since the benefit prior to the introduction of U.S. Pat. No. 5,033,004 was not sufficiently great to warrant the cost.
With the integration of better means of resource realization by means of optimization using methods embodied in U.S. Pat. No. 5,033,004 it is now even more important to keep track of what resources are available, where these resources are and what their quality is to an ever more exacting degree, since if this knowledge is present and readily available, the best allocation can be made possible for the optimum realization of these resources.
Furthermore, optimum resource realization can be achieved by processing a resource sufficient to meet the quality expectations of its end use. In the case of coal, it is washed based on expected float and sink information from lab samples evaluated from each specific coal that may be processed. Degrees of beneficiation in coal occur by controlling such processing variables as specific gravity and screening in the coal washing process. To determine how to best realize the value of coal from its various processing options as can be achieved through the methods embodied in U.S. Pat. No. 5,033,004, it is necessary to keep detailed track of the associated beneficiation parameters associated with each coal and again keep detailed track of each coal as it is transferred, evaluated and stored so that these associations are not lost or made ineffective by ever greater inaccuracies.
Other needs arose for the tons, and weighted average qualities and costs of stockpile groupings (either subsets or supersets of stockpiles) to be used as input to the embodiment of U.S. Pat. No. 5,033,004. Without the close tracking of the allocation elements that support this information, it many times cannot be readily or accurately made available.
Also, accounting for the allocation and processing of coal sources is usually developed around preset allocation paths. When a method such as that embodied in U.S. Pat. No. 5,033,004 suggests alternative allocation paths, there can be inertia on the part of managers to attempt these alternatives because of inflexibilities of their accounting and software infrastructure to accommodate these new alternatives.
A need therefore arose for an infrastructure change in the tracking of the entire resource allocation chain, for better and more automatic tracking of the data associated with the transfer and positioning of such resources, a combination of independent and integrated data collection and organization associated with the transfer, processing, and quality evaluation of such resources, as well as a new set of base allocation operations and database structures designed to enable and accommodate any type of resource allocation that might take place by an organization of such operations into a composite.